Ep. 143 – Building Predictable Pipeline and Breaking Revenue Silos with Thurman Sneed - Part 1

General Episode Description:

In this episode of Selling Intelligence, Thurman Sneed, Chief Revenue Officer at Marigold, joins Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson to unpack a simple but often overlooked discipline in revenue leadership: do the math. Drawing from his background in finance, operations, and revenue leadership, Thurman explains how sellers can turn an intimidating quota into a practical action plan by understanding their pipeline, win rates, gaps, and the time they have left to close them.

The conversation also explores how Thurman’s finance background shapes the way he approaches forecasting, pipeline quality, and cross-functional leadership. He shares why revenue teams need a single source of truth, how leaders can eliminate bloated pipeline, and why sales, marketing, customer success, and RevOps perform better when they understand each other’s goals and operate as one connected revenue organization.

What You’ll Learn:

• Do the Math: How to break quota goals into pipeline requirements, win rates, and achievable daily actions.
• Pipeline Gap Planning: How sellers can use existing pipeline, marketing, SDRs, and customer success relationships to build a realistic path to quota.
• The Value of Time: Why starting pipeline generation early gives sellers more ways to close the gap and avoid end-of-year pressure.
• Forecasting with a Finance Mindset: How financial discipline helps leaders identify inflated pipeline and focus on opportunities that are actually real.
• One Source of Truth: Why shared data and reporting create better conversations across sales, marketing, finance, and operations.
• Breaking Revenue Silos: How understanding the goals of adjacent teams can improve selling, customer handoffs, retention, and overall revenue performance.

Key Topics:

• Pipeline math and quota attainment
• Individual seller forecasting
• Win rates and pipeline coverage
• Pipeline quality and deal qualification
• Revenue forecasting
• Finance driven revenue leadership
• Sales accountability and coaching
• Cross-functional revenue alignment
• Sales, marketing, and customer success collaboration
• Breaking organizational silos
• Single source of truth for revenue teams

Guest Spotlight: Thurman Sneed

Thurman Sneed is the Chief Revenue Officer at Marigold, where he leads sales, customer success, revenue operations, and marketing. With a career that began in accounting and auditing before expanding into operations and revenue leadership, Thurman brings a distinctive financial and operational perspective to the CRO role. His leadership philosophy centers on disciplined execution, data driven decision making, cross-functional alignment, and helping teams turn ambitious revenue goals into practical, achievable actions.

Resources & Mentions:

• Marigold
• Pipeline management and forecasting
• Revenue Operations
• Cross-functional revenue alignment
• The Two Millimeter Club by AGS

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Mark (00:30)

Welcome to Selling Intelligence. I am Mark Petruzzi here as always with KK Anderson. Today we are talking about a phrase that most revenue leaders say and almost nobody actually does.

KK Anderson (00:43)

Do the math. Our guest uses it with his team constantly, and the first time you hear it, you might think it sounds a little cold, but it's quite the opposite. He uses it to take a seller who is convinced they are going to miss and show them on paper why they are not and how they can close the gap.

Mark (01:02)

So Thurman Sneed is the chief revenue officer at Marigold. He started his career as an auditor at Arthur Anderson, spent years running go-to-market operations. He has sat in the chief operating officer seat, and now leads revenue. Thurman, welcome to the show.

Thurman (01:20)

Thank you, Mark. Glad to be here.

Mark (01:22)

Welcome to Selling Intelligence. I am Mark Petruzzi with KK Anderson and this is the show for revenue leaders who would rather diagnose than guess.

KK Anderson (01:32)

Here's the thing that got our attention. Our guest spent years in operations assuming that sales managers underneath him were sitting down with individual sellers and walking them through their numbers. Then he took the revenue seat and found out that they were not. Not the team level math, the individual level math.

Mark (01:49)

Thurman Sneed, aka the Thurminator, I've heard that recently, is the chief revenue officer at Marigo, where he owns sales, customer success, revenue operations, and marketing. He came up through accounting and operations rather than through a quota, which makes him a rare profile in this seat and a very powerful one. Thurman, thanks for being here.

Thurman (02:14)

Thank you, Mark, for having me. I'm excited.

Mark (02:16)

So you have a phrase your team hears from you constantly. Do the math. Take us inside the first time you sat down with a rep and actually did it. What went on that that page?

Thurman (02:28)

Well, the first thing that went on that page was a little bit of a challenge in asking what is your current pipeline? And you might think that the person would reel that off just really quickly, but it wasn't that quick. So the but that was the first part of the math. What is your current pipeline? Okay. So once we get to that number, I ask a second question. What is your win rate? Your personal win rate.

On top of what is the win rate for that vertical, that industry? What what have others experienced potentially? Especially in the c in this particular case, it was a new rep. And I wanted to make sure that this individual knew the history of this particular vertical. And so we went on a journey for every step. That win rate, I let

The individual rep picked what they wanted to use versus the historical because they were more conservative than the historical. The second piece of that was all right, there's a gap there once you exhaust your existing pipeline. Let's take that gap, apply that same win rate the opposite way, right? And that's that's how much pipeline you need to be able to see that has the potential to close in the in the rest of the year.

So you can think about that and say, I like to think of things in a very similar way that I do in real estate because I love investing in real estate. But how many different ways can you close that gap now with 11 months left? Way one, marketing didn't turn off. So you're going to continue to get some business from marketing inbound leads. Number two, you have an SDR that's assigned to work with you.

What are you two going to work together to go get from two perspectives? One from a new division or cross-selling type of perspective, and one from a new logo in your territory perspective. But how are you going to map that out and drive the amount of pipeline that you want to see and close, still applying that same win rate to it? And then the last piece I wanted them to understand.

Is don't forget that there's a CSM in the organization or CSMs, it could be plural, that are also working in your same vertical. Have you had a conversation with them? Have you become friends? Are you all working as a team to realize that part of you closing your number is actually them introducing you to people that they know, giving you referrals?

And so by the time we finished that conversation, someone that was thinking, my God, how in the world am I going to hit my quota? It had been put into more digestible chunks and an action plan that they could go and take and say, most importantly, if I start this today versus starting this six months from now, I'm going to blow my quota out. Right. And that's what I

KK Anderson (05:12)

I love it.

Thurman (05:13)

want this individual to leave the table with.

KK Anderson (05:15)

I love it. And you if you've got someone's average deal size, you've got their win rate, you've got, their quota, you can so easily back into the number of activities that they need to generate to be able to, you know, and then have your conversion rates every step of way. You need to make this many phone calls and this many people, this percent will answer, this percent won't. The ones that answer, this percent will be a qualified, this percent won't.

For the ones that are qualified, and it just goes trickles trickles down. But to the point where that every single day, well, I mean, like for me, for example, if I don't have at least 10 calls that are related to a an op a business opportunity on my calendar, there's a big problem. Right.

Thurman (05:58)

Yes.

KK Anderson (05:59)

And so, and I know that I need to reach out to, you know, a hundred people a week.

And if I do that, then then I'm gonna be able to feed, feed that, feed that pipeline. And so, and you mentioned a new rep, and the new rep has a lot of resources behind them, like you said, through SDR and CSM and getting referrals. Tell me about how you apply this for like your your long-standing reps who aren't who maybe they know what they need to be doing, but they're not doing it.

Thurman (06:25)

It's exactly the same math, believe it or not. And the and the thing is the beauty of it being a new rep is that the new rep gets to start it from the beginning of their journey. For a rep that has been doing it, they might have picked up the habits of not doing the math and sitting down, not just at the beginning of a fiscal year, but all the time. Because once that becomes a consistent thing, they will never find themselves without pipeline. But we all know.

We find we find reps that end up in a situation where they don't have pipeline and it's because they stopped doing the math.

KK Anderson (06:57)

That's right.

Mark (06:58)

So Thurman, you put time into the equation as well, not just the overall pipeline. So what does a seller understand differently once they see what eleven months buys them compared to ten months compared to less than that?

Thurman (07:15)

Yeah, so what a what a rep is gonna see is that they're gonna run out of time if they don't start today. if you

Mark (07:20)

Mm-hmm.

Thurman (07:20)

if you if you and it goes it could actually apply to anything in our lives, and that's that's really the way that I try to bring it home. Most of us have something personal that we want to try to take care of in a certain period of time, and it's it makes the conversation easier.

When you can apply it back to the business perspective too. Right? So you can only get so far if you run out of time. You some at some point in time, the end of that quota year happens. And I can do, I can do nothing about it. Whether that is going to my marketing team and saying, hey, can we make a correction? Whether that is going to my CSM and saying, Hey, can you introduce me to this person today versus three months from now?

Every every bit of that time makes a difference.

KK Anderson (08:08)

So every CRO listening right now, Thurman, I could almost guarantee it has a seller on their team who is qu probably quietly certain they are they're gonna miss their number. They're not gonna they're not gonna hit it. What are what are if you are that CRO and you have a seller in that position, like what's the first thing you're gonna do with them? The first three numbers you're gonna put in front.

Thurman (08:31)

Well the first the first numbers that I'm gonna put in front of them is

Did you what did you do last year? Or what did you do last period? And try to get to the point of understanding how did that occur? Did that occur through volume? Did that occur through some anomaly? Because again, back to if you're if you didn't do the preparation before, you only can drive so much in a certain period of time. So do you need to go produce an anomaly?

for whatever that anomaly might be in your size of business, or do you need to go after volume? and those those can be those can result in different actions. So the first thing is what is the gap? How can I actually close that gap? Can I close that gap with three or do I need 20 types of things to

KK Anderson (09:15)

And then you put them on some kind of a tighter accountability cadence with you?

Thurman (09:19)

Tighter,

tighter account yes, tighter accountability with the management team, tighter accountability with marketing,

KK Anderson (09:25)

Mm-hmm.

Thurman (09:26)

to go and close that gap in a meaningful way. Everything needs to come down to the point that it's achievable. Not not something that is a pipe dream, so to speak. It needs to be written down in a way that the rep believes that their counterparts believe when I say counterparts, their teammates believe that it can be achieved.

KK Anderson (09:45)

Mm-hmm.

Mark (09:45)

All right. Well, let's, Thurman, let's take you back to your your journey from the finance seat to the revenue seat. you started your career as an auditor and an accountant, and somewhere along the way, I would imagine that somebody, CIO or someone else, tapped you on the shoulder and told you to go lead a CRM project. And I do know that you've you got into the first C.

CRM project and you said you had some really big takeaways, especially from your finance perspective to begin with. What did what did you see by working with the sales team for the first time in your career?

Thurman (10:25)

Well, working with I realized I worked with fine, I mean with the sales team from the jump, really. so when I left Arthur Anderson and I got into my first role, I didn't think of it that way. I was still in fine finance and including the opportunity that you're alluding to, I was still squarely in finance. but I was in a cross functional type of finance role. I was to help them do their pipeline management.

I was to help them do their forecasting, even revenue recognition off the deals that they booked. And so because of that, I just I developed a a different type of relationship than a lot of people developed, mainly because of the setup of that type of organization and how we were in the middle and the glue between the sales team and the rest of the organization.

KK Anderson (11:12)

So for years you were the right hand to a series of CEROs doing doing the work they were uncomfortable right? Going to finance, going to marketing, building the report. So what what does a revenue leader gain when they stop hand handing those conversations to somebody else?

Thurman (11:30)

To me, you gain respect and the ability to have conversations when in a non-threatening type of way. I think a lot of times when a CRO would go to a finance person, it becomes a you better do this, or I need you to do this, or that type of thing. And having that finance background, I could understand why finance might say no. And then I could return that back around into.

why finance would say yes. And I could only do that because of that, that finance background that I had. And I because I knew what they were trying to protect the company from or what have you. Same thing from an operational perspective is when we when we would develop reports and things along those lines, I wanted to avoid people coming into a room and saying your report is wrong. Or those are not the numbers that I see.

And so because I was in that again, finance operational type of lens all the time, we I want to remove those types of barriers. Here's our single source of truth. We're all going to come to the meeting and we're going to use the same report. And at first, that is extremely uncomfortable for people to do. One, because they want to speak from their report and their lens. And another is that's not gonna necessarily show me in the greatest light, right?

But when once

KK Anderson (12:46)

Yeah.

Thurman (12:47)

you start to operate as a team and you pull the thread all the way through, and everybody understands, what, we have the same goal. At the end of the day, we're all trying to drive the same success. We might as well use this same report and be able to see how marketing is doing, how sales is doing, et cetera. because that's the best way for us to change them.

Mark (13:06)

So Thurman, what does someone trained in finance see in a pipeline that a leader who came up carrying a number just looks at differently and reads differently as well?

Thurman (13:17)

Yeah, so for me, and I was I was probably being able to cut through the anomalies a lot faster. being able to decipher what is real versus in bloated or inflated. We all have been there, We've seen pipelines like that. We go to new companies and we say, what is the first thing that a CR does? let me let me get out the bloated pipeline. Let me kill kill all of those deals that are never gonna happen. From a finance perspective,

I can do that quicker. sometimes you might end up in situations where you don't actually have the ability to have the sales teams take it out, Meaning that you have to live with the bloated pipeline and you have to act like you don't see that is there. But now in this role, I can just say, you know what, just let's kill those deals. I always wanna just see what is the real quality pipeline that we are working so that we can be honest and truthful. And again,

identify what you were alluding to earlier, what is our real gap that we are tr solving for?

KK Anderson (14:13)

Do you feel like your numbers and your your forecast is more accurate because of that background?

Thurman (14:17)

my y absolutely it is.

KK Anderson (14:19)

Yeah.

You you should like you should do like a master class, Thurman, for

Thurman (14:24)

So

KK Anderson (14:25)

you can you can promote it to our audience and how to how to nail your forecast with a by you know, with your finance background.

Thurman (14:31)

It it takes a

lot of uncomfortable situations though. Yeah.

KK Anderson (14:36)

Well, and you said in our our prep call that this is the most fun you've had in a long time in the seat that you're in now. so what is it about this seat that finally puts all of it to work at once and it's kind of the the great coming together of all of your years of experience and what you're doing in your future. Tell us tell us tell us why.

Thurman (14:54)

it's I think it's appreciating the blessing that I had in the way that I came up, honestly, and being able to share that through teaching. I can't decipher when I'm speaking from a finance perspective, an ops perspective, an overarching business. It's hard for me to distinguish that. And it's because of, you know, the different experiences that I was blessed to to be a part of. but my thermonisms kind of represent that, So as I started to speak about those and just

Appreciate the fact that people that have worked with me for so long have heard me say these things all the time. And I live by them, whether that is directionally correct or 80-20. They all mean they're all tied together and trying to get us to focus on the right things, focus on the real pain. Let's not focus on the exceptional type stuff that actually drains our time, drains our energy.

and gets in the way of us actually producing the outcome we're seeking.

Mark (15:48)

All right, so let's move down to the whole concept of breaking down the silos. Your stated passion is getting people to understand what sits a little to their left and a little to their right. What does that look like as a standing practice inside a revenue team, not only as a value on a wall?

Thurman (16:07)

So, so for me, what that looks like is someone genuinely and every person, literally, I want every person in my team at some point to do this, is to ask someone that is not in their function, what are their goals? What have they actually been asked to achieve in their function? Especially those that are to the left or right. So think about this from if you're in sales, think about marketing to your left, upstream of you.

Think about that CSM that's downstream of you. So many times a sales can sell something and hand it over, and then it's painful to the life of that CSM that's inheriting it. What if that looked differently? What if you truly understood what made retaining a customer easier? And you could do something in your selling process to help that. So

That's what it looks like though, just just leaning a little bit, not trying to go deep and become marketing, not trying to go deep and become the CSM, but just at being being comfortable getting closer to someone and not sitting back to back to them and not really ever asking that type of question.

Another way that I like to do this is to build cadences that include everyone, as opposed to marketing having their cadence, sales having their cadence, CSMs having their cadence. Let's actually bring everybody together so that they can actually hear and see one another and ask questions that can be that every function has to address. How am I going to make sure that we optimize this?

KK Anderson (17:32)

So in a almost in a round table setting where you're bringing in the internal functions and you're you know, it's an internal customer motion.

Thurman (17:40)

Yes, that's kind of what my staff meetings look like, actually.

KK Anderson (17:43)

Mm-hmm.

Yep. I love that. And it's so true. If we treat the cross-functional areas in our company as internal customers, and we're always wanting to, be fanatical about the customer experience, whether it's internal or external. and that's a guiding a guiding value in a North Star. I mean, that's the way to do it. and especially today with AI.

Which you know, an AI workflow breaks down breaks down the silos. You can't even you can't even really think about a company in in terms of departments anymore because, what you can do with AI cross functionally is incredible with being able to to connect the different departments and connect the units. And if you don't know what the other's doing, then you're gonna have a hard time.

Thurman (18:26)

Yes, that's very true. I like that analogy today. I

KK Anderson (18:29)

Yes.

Mark (18:30)

All right, well Thurman, I think this is a good place for us to pause our session one. You've given people some something already that's very concrete to take back. And I I want to let it sit for a minute here before the the next step.

KK Anderson (18:47)

Yes. I especially enjoyed hearing the story about a seller who walked in nervous about how they were gonna hit the number and did the math and walked out energized and and let's just hope they did hit their number. you didn't tell us if they did, but I bet they did, knowing you. so what Thurman just described is also the work we do here at AGS inside the two millimeter club. And the two millimeter club is our small group.

data driven coaching program for frontline sales managers where they learn to identify and coach the small shifts in seller behavior that add up to exponential movement movement and pipeline. We have four eight-week cohorts that launch monthly. And if you'd like to learn more, you can apply at get-ags.com forward slash two mm club. That's get-ags.com.

Ford slash two MM Club. Now come back next week in part two. Thurman takes us takes the same math and points it straight at the customer and tells us where AI actually earns its place in a revenue team. Stay with us.

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